Two studies released Sunday may act like brakes on popular social-science assertions that gay parents are the same as — or maybe better than — married, mother-father parents.

“The empirical claim that no notable differences exist must go,” Mark Regnerus, a sociology professor at the University of Texas at Austin, said in his study in Social Science Research.

Using a new, “gold standard” data set of nearly 3,000 randomly selected American young adults, Mr. Regnerus looked at their lives on 40 measures of social, emotional and relationship outcomes.

He found that, when compared with adults raised in married, mother-father families, adults raised by lesbian mothers had negative outcomes in 24 of 40 categories, while adults raised by gay fathers had negative outcomes in 19 categories.

Findings such as these do not support claims that there are “no differences” between gay parenting and heterosexual, married parents, said Mr. Regnerus, who helped develop the New Family Structures Study at the university.

Instead, “children appear most apt to succeed well as adults when they spend their entire childhood with their married mother and father, and especially when the parents remain married to the present day,” he wrote.

Mr. Regnerus‘ study of 2,988 persons ages 18 to 39 — including 175 adults raised by lesbian mothers and 73 adults raised by gay fathers — marks the first research from the new dataset, which initially included some 15,000 persons.

The second study, also in Social Science Research, takes a critical look at the basis of an oft-cited American Psychological Association (APA) report on gay parenting.

The APA brief says, “Not a single study has found children of lesbian or gay parents to be disadvantaged in any significant respect relative to children of heterosexual parents,” said Loren Marks, associate professor at the School of Human Ecology at Louisiana State University.

However, after looking at the 59 studies that undergird this assertion, “the jury is still out,” Mr. Marks said. “The lack of high-quality data leaves the most significant questions [about gay parenting] unaddressed and unanswered.”

Problems with the APA-cited studies were their tiny size; dependence on wealthy, white, well-educated lesbian mothers; and a failure to examine common outcomes for children, such as their education, employment and risks for poverty, criminality, early childbearing, substance abuse and suicide. Instead, the APA studies often looked at children’s gender-role behaviors, emotional functioning and sexual identity.

An APA spokesman could not be immediately reached for comment.

[…]

Mr. Regnerus cautioned that his study does not attempt to “undermine or affirm arguments” about gay rights or link poor adult outcomes solely to gay parenting.

However, it should raise the bar for research on gay parenting, especially since it is does not rely on “snowball samples,” in which gay parents are recruited in the same places as their gay friends and colleagues, said Patrick Fagan, a family and marriage scholar at the Family Research Council.

The Regnerus study is a “gold standard,” Mr. Fagan said. And if “you can’t draw conclusions from it” about causality, “there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell you can draw conclusions from those other [gay parenting] studies,” he said.

5 Comments on “Two New Studies Suggest Children Are Better Off in Heterosexual Families”

Wow, forcing kids who were not born that way into homosexual relationships. Its for the kids, you know! Democrats believe they have a civil right to abuse others. The USA has truly become a force of evil. The homosexual obsession of the democrat party is a sure sign that our country is in a major decline. Perhaps eugenicists were right. It is as if 9-11 caused acceleration in their madness.

We’ve all seen the movie, it’s the end of the world and all they care about is having sex one last time.